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I have a Lenovo desktop running Win 7 with a Hitachi 1 terabyte hard drive and 8GB of RAM. I also have a WD My Passport 1T external drive running as backup. I'm now receiving messages that

the system is critically low on disk space

Here's the situation:

  • When I right-click the local disk (C:) it shows 306MB bytes free of 906GB,
  • yet when checking C: Properties there are only 87.48GB appearing:
    • Program Files = 1.13GB,
    • Program Files (x86) = 940MB,
    • Windows = 506MB,
    • Users = 84.9GB,
    • several others.

What happened to all my disk storage space, and what can I do to get it back?

Raystafarian
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Alan in Oxford
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2 Answers2

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I would recommend running the Disk Cleanup tool that is located in the Start / Accessories / System Tools folder. This program can identify and free disk space that can generally be released. It also reports the size of each category which will help you see if your trouble area is being identified.

You can also check your System Protection settings to see how much disk space is allowed for use by the system restore and previous versions. You can check this by Control Pannel / System / System Protection. Select the drive you want to check from the list and click the Configure button.

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A typical Windows 7 installation directory holds 15GB of data, so if you are only seeing 506MB then this indicates that your user account does not have permissions to see all the data on the disk. Checking again while logged in as an administrator should show you where the space is being taken up.

Also, if you have large hidden files taking up a lot of space, it's going to be useful to show these too. You can do this by opening Explorer and going to "Organize" > "Folder and search options" > "View" > "Show hidden files, folders and drives".

Philip Davies
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